Ahrefs: 66.5% of links to sites are dead. How can we protect our link building strategies?
Posted: Thu Dec 05, 2024 5:30 am
Having broken links on your website is not good for your SEO because they direct your visitors to empty pages and make Google view your domain as less authoritative. For this reason, it is necessary to understand how important a link building strategy is and how to avoid having broken links.
Ivan de Souza
May 12, 22 | 6 min read
ahrefs site links are inactive
Reading time: 5 minutes
You’ve probably already had the experience of checking out a website or blog post, clicking on a link to check out additional information, and seeing a broken page. Annoying, right? But more than that: broken links are extremely detrimental to an SEO strategy .
Some of us may think that websites don’t have many broken links. If you’re okay with that, we have some (bad) news for you. According to Siteefy , there are around 1.17 billion websites in the world and 83% of them are down.
So, do you remember all those links you placed in your blog posts two or more years ago? How can you be sure they are still there? If they are not, your organic results will suffer.
Recently, Ahrefs released a study showing how 66.5% of links to sites have gone down in the last nine years and the main reasons why that happens. We explain it to you in this article, as well as teaching you how to avoid having dead links on your domain to make it stronger.
What's happening with website links?
Ahrefs is a very popular software among slovenia email address people working with SEO. Some of its tools include site audit, link building , keyword research, and competitor analysis, which are very useful for building digital strategies and making better decisions.
Since January 2013, Ahrefs has been analyzing the link performance of websites and according to them, 66.5% of links pointing to 2,062,173 websites have gone down. In addition, 6.45% of them have temporary errors.
This is very bad for user experience and also for SEO because Google recognizes it as an issue that can affect the position of websites in the SERPs .
Why are those links lost?
There are several reasons why a link can be lost. Ahrefs' study identified the 7 most common ones:
disabled (47.7%)
eliminated (34.2%)
tracking error (6.45%)
redirection (5.99%)
not found (4.11%)
non-canonical (0.82%)
not in the idex (0.73%)
A page is disabled when it is deleted because it cannot be crawled or indexed, as the page or domain itself no longer exists.
On the other hand, a deleted link is different because the page still exists, but it no longer links to you. This usually happens during a content update or simply because the person responsible for the website decided to remove the link.
A crawl error occurs when a search engine (like Google, for example) tries to reach a web page and fails. If the page appears after a new crawl, the problem is resolved. But if it doesn't, the page may go down.
301 redirect is a very common action when migrating a website. However, it is necessary to make sure that the link takes us to the correct URL and to avoid too many redirects. When the link is not redirected correctly, its status changes to lost.
When a link is not found , it means that the page has been deleted. Therefore, unless a redirect is made or new content is published on that link, the status will not change.
A non-canonical page is something you don't need to worry about. When you see it in an audit report, that means the link has just changed location, like what happens when you change from HTTP to HTTPS.
Pages marked as "noindex" are considered lost by Ahrefs because, although they exist, they will not be found in search engines.
Finally, we should remember that Ahrefs used their own tools to develop this study. But, when you audit your own website, there are also other good softwares you can use, such as SEMRush or Screaming Frog .
Why is a link building strategy important for SEO?
When we insert links on a website or blog, we give visitors the opportunity to consult them. In addition, we inform Google that our page is also linked to other internal and external pages.
So, just like you would never give a friend a bad recommendation for something, you wouldn’t do the same to your audience and Google by offering them links to bad websites, right? That’s why your links need to be very good for your SEO to work through on-page and off-page actions.
On-page SEO
This type of SEO involves all the internal links on your site or blog. However, it is not just about inserting the links, but rather doing so based on a strategy.
The topic cluster is the most important because it determines which articles are essential for your SEO strategy, so all articles related to the same topic will link to them.
For example: our blog post about interactive content is very strategic because Rock Content offers this kind of solution through Ion . Therefore, every blog post about interactive content will have the first internal link to the main article, which makes the digital authority grow.
Off-page SEO
Off-page SEO is a strategy dedicated to inserting external links into your website and making other pages link to you as well.
Some people may think that it is a risk to include external links in their content because visitors may leave the page and never come back. However, enabling the option to open external links in a new tab can solve this problem.
Additionally, it is important to remember that this type of link building offers a good experience to your readers and makes Google see that your page is connected to good domains.
The same thing happens when other pages link to you. So, it is necessary to have good partners for link exchange and to create really good, shareable pieces of content. Want an example? Imagine how great it would be to have a link from the White House to your website.
How to avoid broken links on your website?
Now that you know the importance of a link building strategy, it's time to learn how to prevent broken links from appearing on your website.
Ivan de Souza
May 12, 22 | 6 min read
ahrefs site links are inactive
Reading time: 5 minutes
You’ve probably already had the experience of checking out a website or blog post, clicking on a link to check out additional information, and seeing a broken page. Annoying, right? But more than that: broken links are extremely detrimental to an SEO strategy .
Some of us may think that websites don’t have many broken links. If you’re okay with that, we have some (bad) news for you. According to Siteefy , there are around 1.17 billion websites in the world and 83% of them are down.
So, do you remember all those links you placed in your blog posts two or more years ago? How can you be sure they are still there? If they are not, your organic results will suffer.
Recently, Ahrefs released a study showing how 66.5% of links to sites have gone down in the last nine years and the main reasons why that happens. We explain it to you in this article, as well as teaching you how to avoid having dead links on your domain to make it stronger.
What's happening with website links?
Ahrefs is a very popular software among slovenia email address people working with SEO. Some of its tools include site audit, link building , keyword research, and competitor analysis, which are very useful for building digital strategies and making better decisions.
Since January 2013, Ahrefs has been analyzing the link performance of websites and according to them, 66.5% of links pointing to 2,062,173 websites have gone down. In addition, 6.45% of them have temporary errors.
This is very bad for user experience and also for SEO because Google recognizes it as an issue that can affect the position of websites in the SERPs .
Why are those links lost?
There are several reasons why a link can be lost. Ahrefs' study identified the 7 most common ones:
disabled (47.7%)
eliminated (34.2%)
tracking error (6.45%)
redirection (5.99%)
not found (4.11%)
non-canonical (0.82%)
not in the idex (0.73%)
A page is disabled when it is deleted because it cannot be crawled or indexed, as the page or domain itself no longer exists.
On the other hand, a deleted link is different because the page still exists, but it no longer links to you. This usually happens during a content update or simply because the person responsible for the website decided to remove the link.
A crawl error occurs when a search engine (like Google, for example) tries to reach a web page and fails. If the page appears after a new crawl, the problem is resolved. But if it doesn't, the page may go down.
301 redirect is a very common action when migrating a website. However, it is necessary to make sure that the link takes us to the correct URL and to avoid too many redirects. When the link is not redirected correctly, its status changes to lost.
When a link is not found , it means that the page has been deleted. Therefore, unless a redirect is made or new content is published on that link, the status will not change.
A non-canonical page is something you don't need to worry about. When you see it in an audit report, that means the link has just changed location, like what happens when you change from HTTP to HTTPS.
Pages marked as "noindex" are considered lost by Ahrefs because, although they exist, they will not be found in search engines.
Finally, we should remember that Ahrefs used their own tools to develop this study. But, when you audit your own website, there are also other good softwares you can use, such as SEMRush or Screaming Frog .
Why is a link building strategy important for SEO?
When we insert links on a website or blog, we give visitors the opportunity to consult them. In addition, we inform Google that our page is also linked to other internal and external pages.
So, just like you would never give a friend a bad recommendation for something, you wouldn’t do the same to your audience and Google by offering them links to bad websites, right? That’s why your links need to be very good for your SEO to work through on-page and off-page actions.
On-page SEO
This type of SEO involves all the internal links on your site or blog. However, it is not just about inserting the links, but rather doing so based on a strategy.
The topic cluster is the most important because it determines which articles are essential for your SEO strategy, so all articles related to the same topic will link to them.
For example: our blog post about interactive content is very strategic because Rock Content offers this kind of solution through Ion . Therefore, every blog post about interactive content will have the first internal link to the main article, which makes the digital authority grow.
Off-page SEO
Off-page SEO is a strategy dedicated to inserting external links into your website and making other pages link to you as well.
Some people may think that it is a risk to include external links in their content because visitors may leave the page and never come back. However, enabling the option to open external links in a new tab can solve this problem.
Additionally, it is important to remember that this type of link building offers a good experience to your readers and makes Google see that your page is connected to good domains.
The same thing happens when other pages link to you. So, it is necessary to have good partners for link exchange and to create really good, shareable pieces of content. Want an example? Imagine how great it would be to have a link from the White House to your website.
How to avoid broken links on your website?
Now that you know the importance of a link building strategy, it's time to learn how to prevent broken links from appearing on your website.